Some Art I Liked: Five Minutes on Angela Fang Zirbes
Summer Birthday Revised, 2024
Above: Summer Birthday Revised, 2024, Angela Fang Zirbes, acrylic on canvas, 30 × 30 inches. Click to enlarge.
TL;DR:
Artist Status: Under the radar. Angela Fang Zirbes is a new painter who uses airbrushed acrylic on raw canvas to create moody monochromatic vignettes.
Price Range: Her works are primarily under $7k.
Where Can I See Her Work? Hashimoto Contemporary (LA) and WOAW Gallery (Hong Kong) have recently featured Angela in group exhibitions. Her first solo exhibition will be with Hashimoto’s New York branch in March 2025.
Angela Fang Zirbes was born in Iowa in 2000(!) and earned her BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2023. She currently divides her time between New York and Iowa.
Her Style
Angela’s paintings stand out for their black and white compositions, where subjects appear suspended between reality and dreams. She creates her works by airbrushing acrylic on raw canvas, a method that brings a softness to her deep black palettes. This method allows her to explore technical contrasts between light and shadow, giving her work an almost cinematic look.
In Summer Birthday Revised (shown above), cartoonish elements blend with items that recall Angela’s Midwestern childhood. The subject—likely an avatar of the painter—is dressed only in underwear, lighting the candles on a birthday cake. You can almost feel the sweltering humidity of a Midwestern summer, with melting frosting and still drapes in the background. Yet, there’s a foreboding mood: dark shadows cover most of the subject’s face, and her hands grip the tablecloth, as if she’s seconds away from throwing the cake at an unseen figure.
Above: Rabbit Vase with Flowers, 2024, Angela Fang Zirbes, acrylic on canvas, 22 × 20 inches. Click to enlarge.
Angela’s mixed Asian and White cultural heritage often features in interiors that evoke the rural houses of her Iowa childhood. These interiors are populated by personal and cultural symbols like Chinese pickle jars, traditional wallpapers, and lots of rabbits. In Rabbit Vase with Flowers, her pet rabbit adorns a Chinese vase, blending surreal and nostalgic elements. There’s a dreamlike quality to the piece: two sets of moons and rolling hills appear in the background, while oversized thorns seem to overwhelm the floral arrangement.
Contemporary Context
Angela’s work reflects a fascination with memory and domestic spaces. In interviews, she has mentioned the influence of old family photographs to craft these surreal black-and-white worlds.
Above: White Christmas Revisited, 2024, Angela Fang Zirbes, acrylic on canvas, 30 × 40 inches
In White Christmas Revisited, the subject looks directly at the viewer as if caught in the act. Is she just peeking at what’s inside the boxes, or planning something more mischievous? This tension between humor and unease, all within a standard-looking living room, adds to the piece’s unique charm.
Above: Eine Kleine Nachmusik, 1943, Dorothea Tanning, oil on canvas, 16 × 24 inches, Tate Collection UK. Click to enlarge.
Acclaimed artists like Dorothea Tanning also explored the surreal within familiar settings. In Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Tanning portrays a hotel hallway populated by unsettling figures, like giant sunflowers and sleepwalking girls, with open doors leading nowhere. This creates an atmosphere of psychological anxiety within a seemingly ordinary space, as if conjuring projections of our own imaginations or nightmares. Angela’s monochromatic pieces evoke a similar uncertainty, asking: are our memories as reliable or accurate as we think?
Above: Mama’s Paocai Jar, 2024, Angela Fang Zirbes, acrylic on canvas, 20 × 16 inches. Click to enlarge.
Impact
Angela is relatively new but quickly establishing her presence. She has participated in group exhibitions at Hashimoto Contemporary (Los Angeles) and WOAW Gallery (Hong Kong), and was recently awarded the Artist Prize in this year’s Future Fair (New York). Her first-ever solo exhibition will take place in New York in March 2025 .
Above: Vanity, 2023, Angela Fang Zirbes, acrylic on canvas, 20 × 20 inches. Click to enlarge.
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